Carolina’s Tex-Mex

I am baffled by the bad reviews. Sure, the service is a little bit off, and it is always a linguistic adventure trying to order, but I am of the opinion that good food makes all the idiosyncrasies simply charming little parts of the price of admission, and the food is worth it. The best food I have ever had required a bit of work. It is sad to see a place like this get dragged across the coals because they haven’t quite mastered the art of pampering delicate little wilting lilies.
The food here is good. Get the enchiladas verdes enchiladas rojas, and the guacamole. The salsa is legit. I think they must be getting their tomatoes from a secret underground connection or something, because I haven’t had salsa or Pico de Gallo like this since my mom used to make it when I was a kid.
I’ve lived in Fells Point for two years and lived close by for several years before that. I never tried Carolina’s because I trusted the reviews on Unilocal.Now I have to question everything. I haven’t been happy with the Mexican food that the masses were directing me toward. It has been OK, but nothing amazing. This place has so far outdone all of them on enchiladas, salsa, and guacamole… And Unilocal has them at 3 stars.

Flavor you won’t forget is their motto is Ok this place needs a facelift big time but I don’t eat@places based on their décor I base it on how delicious the food is&this place delivered! Staff was soooooooo friendly (our waitress has only been here for a week from Ecuador but I’m making it my mission to steal her over to the Hilton) Ignore the décor&eat some really, really good food

In addition to slow service, this place should not claim it is Tex-​Mex. The food is «Hispanic» fare; however, Tex-​Mex it wasn’t. It wasn’t Mexican either. I ordered a couple of things, with ground beef, anticipating the markedly distinct flavor of Texas.
The enchiladas had ground beef with this red seasoning (possibly achiote) that tasted awful. Then I ordered the nachos, because who can get nachos wrong. These had that same awful red ground beef on them.
Now seeing that they sell Pupusas, it makes sense that this food was possibly Salva-​Tex. Still, it’s more of El Salvador and less of Texas. And this is most certainly NOT mexican.

The absolute best Mexican Restaurant that I have been to. The nachos and burritos were superb. The staff was great. I highly recommend this restaurant for great food.

Chile relleno was just not at all what I expected. It was ok, but not what I wanted. Green pepper stuffed with beef taco filling, slighty done, pile of «fried cheese/​topping» in a puddle on the side, absentia the cheese. Guess I’m going to Tijuana Tacos.
Salad was wilty. Slither of lime gross.
Better Mexican joints up the street, don’t bother here.

The food was great. The staff was helpful. It was my first time there and I will be back ! The beef taco was delicious and fresh. One of better restaurants in Fells point.

My friend’s meal was great: the papusas were delicious and larger than your standard size. His enchiladas, beans, and rice were done fairly well.
My ceviche was a ginormous portion and I appreciated that greatly for the price. However, it was far too spicy and I could not eat it at all. The oysters were warm… ew! My tiramisu was completely frozen. When I mentioned this to the server she said she knew that is was frozen and still served it. I was disappointed that is was not taken off the bill.

Came for a quick lunch. ATROCIOUS and super diva server who seems to hate life. She was the only one working and then the kitchen ladies who don’t do much in terms of service. The food took 100 years to get out and I only ordered soup. I want to storm out and leave as I write this and the staff need to re-​train or re-​hire the girl who’s currently the «front of house» staff. What terribly rude behavior. The food may or may not be good but it’s not worth it here. Walk around the corner to the other Mexican-​cuisine spots.

Órale, this place is legit. The queso is mediocre (they only make it for us gringos). Everything else was mucho bueno. Let us count the ways:
— Whole tab for two with apps and drinks: 35 bucks!
— Happy hour apps and drinks til 9!
— Awesome, fresh guac
— Fresco chips
— Try the crispy, tender, and flavorful pork tacos
— Wonderful service /​cervezas

We stopped in here this past Saturday for a late lunch/​early dinner because I’ve been craving some good Mexican food with my pregnancy. Initially walking in the door, I wasn’t impressed at all. As the others have said, we were the only ones in here. There was no hostess, and a man seated by the hostess station told us to wait for her.
The décor itself is very old school, but the place was fairly clean. (I admit I’m a kitchen/​restaurant show junkie, so I’ve become pretty observant.) Our waitress greeted us and promptly brought us our drinks. She didn’t speak very good English, so when I asked for a chicken quesadilla, which wasn’t on the menu, she initially said no. I showed her the veggie quesadilla on the menu and asked if I could have «no veggie, with chicken», she seemed ok with it. My boyfriend ordered the chicken tacos, which were my first choice too, but it seemed silly to both order the same thing. I had asked for yellow rice with my quesadilla, which was on the menu, but the waitress said they didn’t have it. How can you not have yellow rice at a Mexican restaurant?
I was really nervous while waiting for my food that maybe the waitress hadn’t understood me, and really started to second guess our decision to stop here without reading reviews. There were people literally in and out of the place while we waited, and cases of beer were being brought in I can only assume, to prep for Saturday night upstairs at the bar. Everyone that walked by said «Hola» and smiled, so they were all pleasant.
After ordering, our waitress finally brought chips and salsa, and judging by these, my nervousness went away about our food. The chips were perfect in thickness and crispness, and seasoned with sea salt. The salsa had a great kick to it, packed with flavor and definitely homemade.
When our food came out, it looked so fresh and delicious. The tacos looked like they were made at home in my kitchen, piled high with veggies. My quesadilla looked so delicious. The rice served with it was white rice, and it also came with a salad on the side.
For white rice, this was the best white rice I’ve ever tasted. I believe it had olive oil and sea salt in it… excellent! My boyfriend said his tacos were delicious as well. My quesadilla was so good, and you could tell it was something that they specially made for me… there was a bone in my chicken… which was fine because it was big enough that I saw it before I bit down.
Once we started eating, our waitress warmed up to us and got much friendlier, even joking about her pronunciation of ‘bag’ as ‘back’.
There were a few things that kept me from giving this place a perfect score. One was the restroom… it was filthy. It was a shared restroom, and it was just disgusting. Dark, dingy, and smelly. For a pregnant woman, this is a huge turn-​off. The second thing that really kept that 5 star rating from being awarded was the fact that there was not yellow rice available. The white rice was the best I’ve ever had, but I can only imagine how amazing the yellow rice would’ve been!
Overall, I will definitely be back to Carolina’s in the future!

I’d heard a lot of conflicting things about Carolina’s so I had some reservations about going here, but after having had their food I decided this was a solid find. The dining area certainly doesn’t look very appealing with no windows and wallpaper that looks like it’s about 40 years old. There was also loud, lousy music coming from a bar area upstairs when I came here. Not a great first impression, but at least the staff was friendly.
What Carolina’s lacks in atmosphere it makes up for in food. I got to try a couple of their more tex-​mex style dishes (seafood burrito and tongue enchiladas) so I can’t comment on their more interesting looking dishes like paella or seafood soup, but what I did have was delicious. Even the beans were tasty, a far cry from the canned refried crap you get at a lot of restaurants. I didn’t try their margaritas after the bad things I’d heard about them, but the beer selection here is good and very reasonably priced.

Truly awful. My expectations were not high but I was dismayed by the horrible service and dishonesty. We had to ask 4 times for a refill of chips. We asked the price for a beer and were told one thing but upon receiving our bill we were told something totally different. They are incompetent and rude and do not have good food. I’m really disappointed with the Mexican food scene in Baltimore. I was hoping this place would change my ming but really I’d rather have Taco Bell. It would have saved a lot of time and money.

It was a little strange at first because no one was at the front to greet us so we awkwardly just walked towards the tables where someone intercepted us. Our waitress spoke broken english but was very nice and tended to our needs well. I was very pleased with the enchiladas that I ordered. The refried beans were a strange consistency but tasty nonetheless and I will most likely be back.

SOOOO good and fresh. Best Mexican I’ve ever had!

The good: the food was okay. Strange that the rice is plain white rice, but I had chicken tacos and my gf had a bean burrito. The beans were decent. The chicken kind of tasted like it came out of a can. Maybe don’t order chicken if you like chunks of real chicken in your food.
The bad: the upstairs is loud. The décor/​ambiance is pretty bad. Our waitress spoke almost no english, which is generally a good sign, but don’t order anything too crazy if you habla ingles or you might not get what you wanted. The coke was flat. I used the upstairs bathroom and it was disgusting. The dirty sink that is shared by both bathrooms had no soap, no paper towels and a we roll of toiler paper sitting on it. Nasty. I told my girlfriend to try the downstairs one and there was barf on the floor.
I gave it two stars because the food is passable, and I don’t have food poisoning in spite of the horrific food safety situation. In reality, there is no way in hell I will return to this place.

STAY FAR, FAR AWAY!!!
On a midweek afternoon, I decided to check out this place, due to locale, affordability, and some positive reviews I’ve read. Now let me start out by saying that I really, REALLY wanted to like this place! I love me some Mexican and Tex-​Mex, and I also like your out of the way or hole in the wall type places.
When I arrived, the dining room was empty, and there was no one at the entrance to greet me, so thankfully I had read about the bar upstairs (otherwise, God knows how long I would have had to just stand there before someone appeared). As I reached the top of the steps I was greeted with by the female bartender and two male patrons with a look like «Who are you? And what do you want?» Not exactly a friendly welcome.
So I ask the bartender for a margarita. I swear I think this is either the first time she’s ever heard of one or even made one; which one I’m not sure. I’ve never had a bartender take 10 minutes to make a simple margarita before! I knew it was a bad sign when she brought out a bottle of Bacardi and a bottle of Triple Sec. (Don’t you make margaritas with TEQUILA?!?) After struggling for what seemed like an eternity, my drink finally arrived (her obvious lack of skill in the English language prohibited me from even suggesting that I wanted it on the rocks, with salt). Yuck. It tasted like lemon-​lime koolaid with alcohol added. It was disgustingly sweet, and probably one of the worst margaritas I’ve ever had in my life.
Okay, now moving on to the entrée. (Chips and salsa were later apparently available, you just have to ask for them; wish I had known) I ordered the enchiladas colorados, your basic beef enchiladas covered with cheese and enchilada sauce. My first impression: you’re serving WHITE RICE with a Mexican dish??? I was like WTF??? Then there were the refried beans that also came as a side. The «beans» were in a white styrofoam container on the plate; a little odd, I thought, but what the heck. While whatever was in that container certainly had the traditional brown color of refried beans, there was not a bean in sight! It was more like refried bean juice. Eh, it tasted good, and it definitely made the plain white rice taste much, much better. Just a little odd to have no beans in your refried beans.
Now on to the enchiladas. They tasted okay, but I’ve had better, and they were lukewarm in the center. Now, if it had tasted great but was lukewarm, OR if it tasted just okay but was hot, then I would have been happy. But, judging by this one experience, I would not order it again. Very average.
As if things could not get worse, I paid by credit card. My tab CLEARLY came to $ 22.10, but when the waitress reappeared from downstairs (somebody else had to run it through the credit card machine), it said the amount swiped was $ 27.10. WTF? So when I brought the discrepancy to the waitresses attention, she said «She musta put it in wrong.» Period. NO «Oh, I’m sorry» or «Oh, let me see if I can correct that for you.» Instead all I got was a blank, deer-​in-​the-​headlights stare. So I mumbled something like «I guess that will be your tip then.» After a mediocre meal and the worst margarita of my life, I was just in no mood to argue with non-​English speaking people about THEIR mistake. So maybe I only ended up paying two bucks more total than I had intended, including tip, BUT it’s the principle of the thing. NEVER, EVER AGAIN…

For a long time I thought this place was closed because the phone number posted online was disconnected, and it looks sorta decrepit from the outside. I recently found their new number and tried to order takeout, but they didn’t answer the phone anyway, so I walked down there. I got the nachos, based on a 2007 CityPaper award they have on the wall for best nachos in Baltimore. They were OK. They’re the kind I prefer, the individually-​constructed kind, not the pile of chips with a bunch of stuff dumped on top. I liked them but I wasn’t blown away. Guacamole would have been nice. It was also a smaller portion than the feed-​a-​whole-​table serving of nachos most places will serve. But then, it was only $ 6.
On another note, I was really pleased that this place was open at 9:30 pm on a Wednesday. I often don’t think to eat until around that time and a lot of places get bitchy about serving food that late. All the staff were very friendly, even though there weren’t any other customers in the dining room downstairs. (There was music coming from the upstairs though, and I saw some Spanish-​speaking people go up there, so maybe that area is jumpin’ at that time).

This was by far the worst Mexican restaurant I have ever been to. I ordered a frozen margarita. Pretty standard. I asked for no salt. The lady looked at me like I was crazy. The Spanish word for no is no, the word for salt is sal. I tried that. Still no idea what I was talking about. Typically, «no comprende» at a Mexican restaurant is a good sign — the less English they speak, the more authentic the food. This was not the case. I think it was the first time a margarita was made in the restaurant because mid-​way through making the margarita they asked if I would like whipped cream on it. ??? I of course said no, but for some reason it came out looking like a piña colada and tasting lime a lemon-​lime snow cone with no alcohol. I’d like to say the atrocities stopped there, but they did not. Our pinto/​refried beans came out in a styrofoam cup tasting like burnt rubber. The enchiladas were mediocre at best. There is so much good food to choose from in this area; just skip over this restaurant.

I have had Hispanic food all through Mexico and here in the US and this place has by far the best authentic dishes. This place is small but I could not believe the variety in the menu and with the huge portions I alway have to bring food home. This is a must for anyone in Baltimore looking for authentic Tex Mex cuisine !

I have been making my way through all the local mexican joints in upper fells point, and last night my room mate and I decided to try Carolina’s Tex-​Mex, on Gough St (Not to be confused with Carolina’s Tex-​Mex on Broadway, less than 3 blocks away, and apparently owned by a sister of this Carolina’s).
It was pretty dead inside, a couple of people playing pool, but very clean and welcoming. We got a few chicarron pupusas, which were like thick soft tortillas with cheese and pork-​absolutely amazing!!! Just gooey and flavorful.
We also split the Mexican Combo, which included a beef enchilada, a chicken burrito, and a chicken taco. The tortillas on the tacos were clearly homemade, a little crunchy and salty and delicious. The burrito and enchilada were hot and flavorful, with just a little kick somewhere in there. My only regret was that we didn’t splurge for a side of guac!
Don’t be fooled by appearances, this place is a total diamond in the rough, venture inside and your stomach will come out thanking you!